THE MACARONI CLUB

A macaroni (or formerly Maccaroni).

In mid-18th century England, was a fashionable fellow who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected and epicene manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire.

There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.

It would appear that the macaronis originated among a number of young men,who had made the grand tour,and on their return,formed themselves into a club,which,from a dish of macaroni,then little known in England,being always placed upon the dinner table,was called the Macaroni Club.

A magazine writer of the time,evidently alluding to this origin,says,' The macaronis are the offspring of a body,a many-headed monster in Pall Mall,produced by a demoniac committee of depraved taste and exaggerated fancy,conceived in the Court of France and Italy,and brought forth in English.' 

Horace Walpole,however,writing about the same time,gives the macaronis different pedigree,ascribing their origin to the enormous wealth,lately gained by certain persons,through Clive's conquests in India, and asserts that their boundless extravagance soon dissipated it,and brought them to poverty.

'Lord Chatham', he says,'begot the East India Company begot Lord Clive,Lord Clive begot the macaronis,the macaronis begot Poverty,and all the race are still living,'

In the following year,1773,he writes,'A winter without politics-even our macaronis entertain the town with nothing but new dresses, and the size of their nosegays.They have lost all their money,and exhausted their credit,and can no longer game for Pounds 20,000 a night.'

The macaronis took the town by storm.Nothing was fashionable that was not a' la macaroni.

Even the clergy had their wigs combed,their clothes cut,and their delivery refined a'la macaroni.

The shop windows were filled with prints of the new tribe;there were engraved portraits of turf macaronis,military macaronis,college macaronis,and other varieties of the great macaroni race.

At balls,no other than macaroni music could be  danced to;   at places of public amusements,macaroni songs were sung.

As I visit places, especially Delhi,Calcutta, Chennai,Mumbai & Bangalore I find the likes of macaronis who have invented dress-eccentricities that were seen in the eighteenth century.Slowly their tribe is increasing everywhere.Good luck to them !